Dream On

In June 2012, when the Obama Administration announced the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Greisa Martinez was selling used cars in Dallas, Texas. Martinez, who was undocumented, quickly signed up. Through the program, which provides legal protection to undocumented migrants who arrived in the United States as children, she was able to obtain a work permit for the first time. She quit her job at the car lot and eventually became the advocacy director for United We Dream, an organization led by undocumented youth. In the years since, her salary has risen by 70 percent and she has purchased her first home. “I’m living my wildest dream,” said Martinez, who is now twenty-eight years old. “It completely changed my life.”

In the past four years, nearly 750,000 undocumented migrants like Martinez have enrolled in DACA. According to a 2015 survey, their wages increased by an average of 45 percent, and 92 percent reported pursuing educational opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t. But under President Trump, they could lose their protected status. Because Obama created the program through an executive order, Trump could easily shutter it—something he repeatedly promised to do during his campaign. In December, he appeared to soften his tone toward undocumented youth, telling Time magazine, that he was “going to work something out” because “they got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here.” But Martinez is still nervous. “You just really don’t know where you’re going to end up,” she said.

Martinez and her family migrated from Hidalgo, Mexico, to Texas when she was only seven years old. Because Texas—along with about twenty other states—allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, Martinez was able, in 2006, to enroll at Texas A&M University, where she majored in political science. After graduating, she volunteered on congressional campaigns, hoping to get a job in politics. But without a work permit, she couldn’t find anyone who would hire her. “It wasn’t until I was eligible for DACA that I was able to use all of that experience and all of the knowledge,” she told me. After gaining DACA status several years ago, Martinez established good credit, moved to Washington, D.C., and landed her job at United We Dream. She now helps cover some of her mother’s health care costs and supports the education of her three younger sisters.

If Trump overturns DACA, people like Martinez could lose more than just their status or income. The program required applicants to provide a host of intimate, personal information, including their current and past addresses. If this data is handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it could be used to track down and deport them or their loved ones. “The biggest threat for someone like me is not only completely upending the lives we’ve built over the last few years but what will happen to our families, what will happen to our parents,” said Martinez. “Did we ourselves give them up?”

There has been pushback in Congress. Earlier this month, members of both houses introduced bipartisan bills to protect DACA recipients from deportation. Meanwhile, John Kelly, the nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security, declined to say whether his department would use applicant data from the program to facilitate deportations. Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, said during his confirmation hearing that deporting enrollees would not likely be the administration’s top priority, but he also stated that, “the attorney general’s role is to enforce the law.” For the time being, United We Dream and other immigrant-rights groups are recommending that people who have not yet applied refrain from doing so, while encouraging those who are already enrolled to file for renewal, as the law requires them to do every two years.

Over the holidays, Martinez went through a “know your rights” training with her family, including instructing them not to open the door unless they know who’s there. She also spoke to one of her sisters about how their lives would change if they lost their work permits. “It’s been a lot of kitchen table conversations about what will happen,” she said. “There has also been silence. There’s this overwhelming fear about what it means, and sometimes families don’t have the right words or tools to be able to talk about it.”

Still, the family knows firsthand how much is at stake. In 2008, Martinez’s father was deported after he was pulled over for failing to make a full stop at a stop sign. “When I think about him, I feel a deep sense of sadness as well as some regret,” she said. DACA recipients can apply to travel outside the United States for humanitarian purposes, but only those facing exigent circumstances—like needing urgent medical care or wanting to attend the funeral of a close relative—are granted permission. Martinez applied a few weeks ago to see her dad, but she hasn’t heard back.

“The sweetest kind of success comes when you thought it was never going to happen to you,” said Martinez, reflecting on how DACA has improved her life. “The most bitter experience is to have it all and have it taken away from you.”

FEATURED ON HARPERS.ORG

Afew months before the United States invaded Iraq, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, was asked on a radio show how long the war would take. “Five days or five weeks or five months,” he replied. “It certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” When George W. Bush departed the White House more than five years later, there were nearly 136,000 US soldiers stationed in the country.

The number of troops has fallen since then, but Bush’s successors have failed to withdraw the United States from the region. Barack Obama campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to send hundreds of troops into Syria. For years Donald Trump described America’s efforts in Afghanistan as “a waste” and said that soldiers were being led “to slaughter,” but in 2017 he announced that he would deploy as many as 4,000 more troops to the country. “Decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained. Every president, it seems, eventually learns to embrace our perpetual war.

With the Trump Administration’s attacks on affordable health care, immigration, environmental regulation, and civil rights now in full swing, criticism of America’s military engagements has all but disappeared from the national conversation. Why hasn’t the United States been able—or willing—to end these conflicts? Who has benefited from them? Is victory still possible—and, if so, is it anywhere in sight?

In March, Harper’s Magazine convened a panel of former soldiers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. The participants, almost all of whom saw combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, were asked to reflect on the country’s involvement in the Middle East. This Forum is based on that panel, which was held before an audience of cadets and officers, and on a private discussion that followed.

Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a writer. Of course, what I meant by “writer” then was a writer of Superman comics. In part I was infatuated with the practically invulnerable Man of Steel, his blue eyes and his spit curl. I wanted both to be him and to marry him—to be his Robin, so to speak. But more importantly, I wanted to write his story, the adventures of the man who fought for truth, justice, and the American Way—if only I could figure out what the fuck the American Way was.

Sarah was four years old when her spirit guide first appeared. One day, she woke up from a nap and saw him there beside her bed. He was short, with longish curly hair, like a cherub made of light. She couldn’t see his feet. They played a board game—she remembers pushing the pieces around—and then he melted away.

After that, he came and went like any child’s imaginary friend. Sarah often sensed his presence when strange things happened—when forces of light and darkness took shape in the air around her or when photographs rippled as though shimmering in the heat. Sometimes Sarah had thoughts in her head that she knew were not her own. She would say things that upset her parents. “Cut it out,” her mother would warn. “This is what they put people in psychiatric hospitals for.”

In the fall of 1969, I was a freelance journalist working out of a small, cheap office I had rented on the eighth floor of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. A few doors down was a young Ralph Nader, also a loner, whose exposé of the safety failures in American automobiles had changed the industry. There was nothing in those days quite like a quick lunch at the downstairs coffee shop with Ralph. Once, he grabbed a spoonful of my tuna-fish salad, flattened it out on a plate, and pointed out small pieces of paper and even tinier pieces of mouse shit in it. He was marvelous, if a bit hard to digest.

The tip came on Wednesday, October 22. The caller was Geoffrey Cowan, a young lawyer new to town who had worked on the ­McCarthy campaign and had been writing critically about the Vietnam War for the Village Voice. There was a story he wanted me to know about. The Army, he told me, was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, in Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam. Cowan did not have to spell out why such a story, if true, was important, but he refused to discuss the source for his information.

The family was informed they would be moving to a place called Montana. Jaber Abdullah had never heard of it, but a Google search revealed that it was mountainous. Up to that point, he and his wife, Heba, had thought they’d be moving from Turkey to Newark, New Jersey. The prospect of crime there concerned Heba, as she and Jaber had two young sons: Jan, a petulant two-year-old, and Ivan, a newborn.

Montanasounded like the countryside. That, Heba thought, could be good. She’d grown up in Damascus, Syria, where jasmine hung from the walls and people sold dates in the great markets. These days, you checked the sky for mortar rounds like you checked for rain, but she still had little desire to move to the United States. Basel, Jaber’s brother, a twenty-two-year-old with a cool, quiet demeanor, merely shrugged.

Illustration (detail) by Danijel Žeželj

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"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."